Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won’t have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it’s overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it’s relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
Self funding or donations
Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won’t have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it’s overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it’s relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that’s less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
Yeah and here is how lemmy.world’s owner funds his Lemmy and Mastodon instances:
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
He said lemmy.world could handle 1 million users and mastodon.world at some point had over 100k active users.
That’s a good question that I’m unqualified to answer but I’m sure that !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is a good resource for this.